Our Lady of Guadalupe, the Divine Feminine, and Joseph Smith’s First Vision

My family and I recently moved to Mexico on a one-year assignment for my job. My wife and I were both Spanish-speaking missionaries (she in Panama and I in the U.S.) and we are excited to immerse ourselves again in the culture and language (not to mention the food!).

A few weeks ago we visited a Catholic church in a small rural town of about 3,500 people on the coast of the Gulf of Mexico. Apart from a Presbyterian congregation, the Catholic parish is the only church in town and sits prominently in the middle of the community, with loud bells that ring out 30 minutes before mass every day.

My oldest daughter (eight years old) noticed the prominent position of the Virgin Mary in the decoration of the church interior. A large statue of Our Lady of Guadalupe occupies a central position behind the altar, with a crucifix with Jesus close by. I explained to her that Nuestra Señora de Guadalupe is perhaps the key identifying symbol of Mexican Catholicism and is also a prominent symbol of Mexican culture as a whole.

I later had the opportunity to talk to an Episcopal priest in the community where we are living. In our conversation about wider topics of religion, politics, and culture in Mexico, he said that many Mexican Protestants condemn the focus on Guadalupe as idolatry. (I was taught similar things growing up in the Mormon tradition.) As a Protestant, he agreed to an extent, but also said that he believes it to be a manifestation of the yearning for the Divine Feminine in Mexican spirituality that is otherwise absent in a strongly patriarchal Catholic culture. Given that reality, he says he doesn’t worry too much about the strong religious focus on Nuestra Señora de Guadalupe: if it helps the people connect with the feminine side of spirituality, all the better.

This led me to do more research on the tradition of Our Lady of Guadalupe in Mexican spirituality and religion. It begins with the story of Mexican peasant Juan Diego who, in 1531, experiences a vision of the Virgin Mary who gives him a special mission. I won’t recount the full story here (see here, here, here, here, or here for details), but what struck me was a variety of parallels to the Joseph Smith First Vision account in Mormonism. Specifically:

Juan Diego and Nuestra Señora de Guadalupe

Joseph Smith and the First Vision

Juan Diego is living in a time of religious confusion. Ten years earlier the Spanish had conquered the Aztec empire and were imposing the Christian faith on the people.

Joseph Smith is living through a time of religious confusion: the Second Great Awakening.

Juan Diego is a poor, uneducated indigenous peasant.

Joseph Smith is a poor, uneducated backwoods farmer.

One morning Juan Diego is walking to a Catholic church for a religious lesson as he learns more about the Catholic faith.

Joseph Smith is investigating a variety of different Christian denominations and concerned about his standing with God.

Joseph Smith sees Jesus (or Jesus and the Father, depending on the account) in the air above him, “whose brightness and glory defy all description.”

The Virgin Mary calls Juan Diego by name, in his native language of Nahuatl.

The Father calls Joseph Smith by name, in his native language of English.

The Virgin Mary identifies herself as the mother of Jesus: “the mother of the very true deity.”

The Father identifies himself as the father of the Jesus: “This is my beloved Son.”

The Virgin Mary gives Juan Diego a mission to build a temple on the site through which she could bless and help the people.

Jesus gives Joseph Smith a vision to restore the Church through which he can bless and help the people.

Juan Diego goes to tell the Catholic Bishop Zumarraga about the vision and his mission. The Bishop does not believe him.

Joseph Smith recounts his story to various religious leaders of the day. They do not believe him.

The Virgin gives Juan Diego a sign: she tells him to gather flowers on the hill and show them to the Bishop. The flowers are growing on a barren spot in December and are not native to Mexico. He gathers them in his tunic and brings them to the Bishop. He releases them on the floor and on the tunic miraculously now appears the image of the Virgin of Guadalupe.

Jesus, through the Angel Moroni, gives Joseph Smith a sign: retrieve a set of records from the hill Cumorah and translate them into English. Despite possessing no knowledge of ancient languages, Joseph translates the book miraculously and it becomes The Book of Mormon, “another testament of Jesus Christ.”

To this day, the tunic with the miraculous image of Guadalupe can be viewed at the Basilica of Our Lady of Guadalupe, inviting visitors to believe.

To this day, the miraculously-translated Book of Mormon can be read in over one hundred languages, inviting readers to believe.

Scholars later identify several different and somewhat conflicting accounts of this narrative.

Scholars later identify several different and somewhat conflicting accounts of this narrative.

One key difference, however, is that Bishop Zumarraga believes the sign and plans begin to build a shrine to the Virgin Mary on that spot (now the Basilica of Our Lady of Guadalupe in Mexico City). Contemporary religious leaders in Joseph Smith’s day, however, continued in their disbelief.

QUESTIONS TO PONDER:

What do you make of the idea that the Virgin of Guadalupe is a manifestation of the yearning for the Divine Feminine in an otherwise patriarchal religious culture? Are there similar or parallel manifestations in Mormonism? How do they compare/contrast with the place of the Virgin of Guadalupe in Mexican Catholicism?

What do you make of the parallels between the narrative of Juan Diego and the narrative of Joseph Smith? What might explain the parallels? (Also, am I stretching too far in drawing the several parallels identified above? Why or why not?)

What implications do these parallels have for our understanding of the relationship between religion and culture?

What implications do these parallels have for our understanding of the nature of religious experience across world cultures?

Is there a place for Juan Diego and Our Lady of Guadalupe in Mormon theology? Can the story of Juan Diego be literally true if Mormon’s founding narrative is literally true, or vice versa? Or are they mutually exclusive?

What other interesting questions emerge from the comparison of Juan Diego and Joseph Smith?

5 Comments

Mark Sells
on August 1, 2017 at 11:24 am

To answer one of the discussion questions, yes, the two visions are mutually exclusive. Despite any parallels between the two visions, the most important difference is that Our Lady of Guadalupe’s revelations to St. Juan Diego never in any way contradicted the Deposit of Faith which includes Sacred Scripture and the teaching of the Apostles. Nor did her revelations contradict any subsequent Church council or magisterial teaching. The “prophet” Joseph Smith on the other hand contradicted all of these in whole or in part and condemned previous centuries of Catholics and Protestants and the Eastern Orthodox as heretics along with all Christians living in his day. For Catholics, one of the tests we employ when anyone claims to have a vision or special revelation is whether or not they contradict what has been revealed to all in the Deposit of Faith. Juan Diego passes this test. Joseph Smith fails.

Also, near the end of the list of parallels, the author references the tunic (or tilma) which still bears the miraculous vision of Our Lady and which can still be seen by pilgrims every day. As a parallel, he offers the “miraculously-translated Book of Mormon” which can still be read, today. The difference here is important. While we still have Diego’s tilma, we do not have the metal plates of the Book of Mormon which Smith allegedly received from the angel Moroni. Conveniently (or inconveniently), they were returned to the angel. We might still be tempted to take seriously the Testimony of the Witnesses who claimed that they saw these plates, except that there is no archeological, linguistic, or genetic evidence to support the claims of the Book of Mormon and much evidence that contradicts it.

I thank the author for providing a good deal of information about St. Juan Diego and Our Lady of Guadalupe. Here are two additional links for those interested. The first link focuses on the plant fiber of the tilma and its miraculous preservation. The second link focuses on the spectacular imagery which can be seen reflected in Our Lady’s eye–just as in a high definition photograph–under magnification not available in Diego’s time.

The most obvious parallels between the two stories are the ones you don’t mention. Neither narrative was contemporaneously reported to anyone, although both narratives themselves claimed otherwise, and the accounts that did finally come forth did so without corroboration many years later.

The differing accounts of the First Vision were dramatically different from each other, even overwhelmingly so. They weren’t just “somewhat conflicting.” The first version bore no resemblance to the version the Church espouses now. It had no God the Father in it, had no statement that other churches were false or an abomination, had no struggle with the devil, included no question of which church was true, was not spurred by reading James 1:5, included no claim that Joseph was persecuted for revealing it, and was never published for the world to read (having been handwritten in Joseph’s own letter book– a sort of personal journal). The differing versions of the Virgin of Guadalupe, while significant in their differences, weren’t night-and-day different like the First Vision’s first and final iterations.

You greatly overstate the similarities between the two narratives in another way when you claim a connection of the Book of Mormon to the First Vision. There was no connection at all between the two. The First Vision account wasn’t even heard of until many years AFTER the Book of Mormon was published in 1830. The First Vision was something no one had even heard of until it was published in 1842, but even then, most Mormons didn’t read about it. Lucy Mack Smith and all Joseph’s immediate family members, Oliver Cowdery and all the Whitmers, all went to their deaths without ever having heard about it, which is why none of them ever mentioned it happening. To them, the first event of spiritual significance in Joseph’s life was the appearance of the angel to announce the plates and the Book of Mormon. When Joseph Smith and Oliver Cowdery collaborated to write the first history of the church in 1835, they made no mention of it. Brigham Young wasn’t even aware of the version Mormons now accept, as his discourse in the Journal of Discourses reveals. He said the Lord didn’t appear to Joseph, but instead sent an angel.

The evidence against the First Vision account of Joseph Smith comes from six or seven major independent pieces of evidence, in addition to the differing versions problem. But the Virgin of Guadalupe account was different than the First Vision account in another important way. As you mention, Ben, the Virgin of Guadalupe account claimed that the virgin left behind a physical artifact purporting to be her own image on Juan Diego’s cloak. If one looks at the actual image, though, it looks nothing like a human being, resurrected or not. It’s far less realistic-looking than the painting you included at the beginning of your essay. The famous image looks like an amateur drawing of a human being, extremely similar to the artistic depictions of heavenly beings and angels popular in the 17th century. The exact same tactic was used by the Spaniards throughout Latin America to coax money and labor out of the peasants to build cathedrals–claim a virgin appeared to someone and requested a church be built there. Mexico, where I served my mission, is full of little towns which claim appearances by the Virgin Mary to some unverifiable person to urge the building of a church. The local populace believes that their town has received some heavenly honor, so they build a big church on the spot. Spain has many such towns too. It wasn’t native Mexican culture at work here, it was the Spanish Catholic methodology of subjecting the peasantry to Catholicism.

Very interesting. I have never before heard the story of Juan Diego. The more I learn about similarities between visions and prophets the more I have to think these occurrences are a trick of the mind. The majority of these visions always start with some type of cultural biased belief. Its almost as if the mind is reinforcing it because they are searching so hard. I had a dream of the second coming that was so vivid. At that time, I looked at it as a personal revelation or inspiration. It motivated me to start doing everything “right”. It made me feel special as if the lord chose to show this to me. I realized later that we had been reading the Book of Mormon as a family and a few days earlier we read and discussed the second coming in 3 Nephi. It dawned on me that my “revelation” was just my imagination doing what it does best. Embellishing.

While the paralels can be drawn without even charting them side by side, this piece is helpful. However you asked for what looks like a stretch and I’d first point to: Juan Diego hears beautiful music and sees a bright light on Tepeyac Hill, a sacred Aztec location. Joseph Smith sees “a pillar of light … above the brightness of the sun” in “The Sacred Grove.” The light is a common trait but the sacredness of the grove is it only so due to LDS believers, while the sacred Aztec location was undoubtedly held a sacred by past generations and contemporaries of Juan Diego. The fact that a native tongue was used at a pre-sacred site of his and his people’s own belief system (prior to conquest), is a tale tale sign of intermixing and reversion back to native belies and cultures in Mexico (similar to other native hybrid beliefs occuring in other conquistador Latin American countries, but being the universal church and taking in, adapting to and digesting cultures instead of completely destroying them this is the very key to the success, growth and dominance of Catholicism). Now in this tumult of opinions we can find another parallel to Smith, but for the Aztec’s, the hill was already sacred, yet for Smith, only revelation and the passing of time made the “sacred grove” sacred.

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